The fall of the AAUP

Before accusing FIRE of dishonesty, partisanship, and ideological capture, they should really look in the mirror.

One of the great disappointments of my professional life has been watching the decline of the American Association of University Professors, formerly the gold standard for defense of academic freedom on campus. Of course, there have always been and still are good, principled AAUP members and chapters out there. But since the beginning of my career back in 2001, the national AAUP have gone from being principled (if slow and plodding) defenders of academic freedom to increasingly partisan critics of freedom of speech and the First Amendment — taking institutional positions that directly threaten academic freedom.

This week Joan W. Scott, a current AAUP member and former chair of the AAUP Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, published a piece in Inside Higher Education making a number of false accusations about my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. This is on the heels of a contentious exchange on X two weeks ago, where FIRE’s Vice President of Campus Advocacy Alex Morey called the AAUP out for their continuing fall from principle, and the AAUP replied with even more (mostly now-deleted) false accusations.

FIRE’s principled, nonpartisan defense of free speech and academic freedom is not only on record, but baked into our very founding in 1999 by left-leaning libertarian Harvey Silverglate and right-leaning libertarian Alan Charles Kors. The AAUP are, sadly, a different story.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of how the AAUP have become a threat to academic freedom and free speech, as well as direct responses to the false claims made both on X and in the Inside Higher Education article.

Strap in, this will be a long one.

The AAUP have championed a stark distinction between free speech and academic freedom, which is dangerous to both

Perhaps the first sign that there was going to be serious trouble between FIRE and the AAUP came many years ago when one of their luminaries, Yale professor Robert Post, claimed that academic freedom must be distinct from the First Amendment understanding of free speech. If it wasn’t, he argued, professors could be drowned out by their students and they would have no recourse to control their classes — because, of course, you would have to apply the same rules to the classroom as you would to a public park, right?

This is a ridiculous, constitutionally nonsensical argument that is difficult to imagine a law professor honestly making. No serious person or organization actually believes that it is a violation of free speech rights to silence disruptive students in class. This is why I was all the more appalled to discover that Post, who I had thought of as a friend, claimed that this was FIRE’s position. We were being used as an example of obvious dummies for positions we never held.

We responded to Post’s claims back in 2017, writing that “the idea that FIRE, or any other free speech organization with which we are familiar, is arguing that professors do not have the right — indeed, the duty — to control their classrooms is simply false.” We then proceeded to give examples going back our entire history.

The point of this weirdly dishonest exercise was to argue that First Amendment law couldn’t hope to understand the academic environment and could therefore never really be applied, completely ignoring the fact that the First Amendment had been handling academic freedom cases quite well for 60 years.

This initial move allowed the AAUP and many of their members to then argue for a strong interpretation of academic freedom while simultaneously divorcing it from free speech and the First Amendment. In fact, this was literally the name and thesis of a book, “It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom,” in which Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth argue for a limited idea of academic freedom and look down their nose at freedom of speech. The AAUP should have disowned this book, but instead they enthusiastically promoted it. (More on that book later.)

This position endangers both free speech and academic freedom. Once professors can argue that they should have the strongest free speech protections in the form of academic freedom but don’t have to give a damn about how those expressive rights are treated beyond academia, academics will naturally feel that they no longer have any skin in the game of protecting the free speech of us regular mortals. And they won’t even be right about that. Once academic freedom is totally divorced from the First Amendment, are they willing to simply trust institutions to provide them with the tools and resources to preserve academic freedom? Particularly in the last 10 years, this is an unearned trust in “management” that is truly bizarre coming from a union like the AAUP.

Academic freedom has explicitly been recognized among the First Amendment’s protections since 1957. The idea being forwarded by the AAUP that, nearly seven decades later, they remain separate and non-overlapping principles is foolish, elitist, and flies in the face of decades of successful constitutional protection for academic freedom.

The AAUP have publicly supported political litmus tests for professors

Next up is the AAUP’s public support for DEI criteria for faculty hiring, which might be the worst thing they have done in terms of undermining their mission of defending academic freedom.

The AAUP’s position regarding DEI statements, which are and can only honestly be considered political litmus tests, should have been that these are never okay. Surely, they understood this when the political litmus tests being pushed in academia were the McCarthyite variety of anti-Marxism. But when the McCarthyism comes from the left — as a transparent way of weeding out dissenters before they’re even allowed to have jobs (what Rikki Schlott and I call the Conformity Gauntlet) — the AAUP instead seek to rationalize why it’s suddenly acceptable.

The idea that anyone, particularly a group of professors, could look out at the overwhelming left-leaning slant among faculty and administrators on campus today and think that the problem is too much political and viewpoint diversity is insane.

As FIRE has been saying for a very long time, required DEI statements are clear violations of academic freedom and free speech rights. FIRE has drafted legislation that would eliminate these political litmus tests — whether they’re the McCarthyite variety from the right or the “woke” variety from the left (yes, you heard that right — the bill is nonpartisan), and has advocated for it in legislatures.

In her piece for Inside Higher Education, Scott (and, given their message, presumably the AAUP) framed this model legislation as an effort that “would overturn the advances made in higher education through policies of antidiscrimination and affirmative action.” Sure sounds evil when you completely misrepresent what it is, what it does, and why, doesn’t it? That statement betrays the ideological blinders Scott and the AAUP insist on wearing. Given the AAUP’s mission of defending “the individual and collective rights of faculty as they pursue the mission of higher education in a democracy,” they should be as allergic to DEI statements, or any other kind of political litmus test, as FIRE is. Instead, they justify them — a stance that would have rightly horrified an earlier generation of AAUP members.

The AAUP came out in favor of academic boycotts and then lied about it

Another recent move the AAUP made that has undermined their own seriousness and credibility is their recent about-face on academic boycotts.

In her Inside Higher Education piece, Scott claims that FIRE has “consistently, deliberately and repeatedly misrepresented” the AAUP’s statement on this issue, which she describes as “a defense of the free speech so dear to [FIRE’s] mission.” She goes on to describe their statement as saying that, “as with all extramural speech, those who do endorse such boycotts should not be penalized for their expressive activity.”

This is an incredibly sneaky and dishonest way to describe what they drafted. If all they meant was that an individual professor could “boycott” Israel, they didn’t need a statement for that because it’s obvious. If the boycott is not happening at the organizational level and it’s simply one person not liking or working with another person or institution, how is that even a boycott? Academic boycotts are systematic by design. As my FIRE colleague Robert Shibley recently wrote for FIRE’s blog, “Because they limit open inquiry and the free exchange of ideas, academic boycotts, as they are most often conducted today, are fundamentally incompatible with the academic freedom that drives knowledge creation and liberal education across the globe.”

The AAUP know this. In fact, Scott herself certainly knows this, because she drafted the AAUP’s old statement on academic boycotts, which says:

The Association recognizes the right of individual faculty members or groups of academics not to cooperate with other individual faculty members or academic institutions with whom or with which they disagree. We believe, however, that when such noncooperation takes the form of a systematic academic boycott, it threatens the principles of free expression and communication on which we collectively depend.

Because we are not idiots, it is clear both from the context and timing of their new announcement that the AAUP adopted this new position to signal that it’s okay for academics to boycott Israeli institutions. This goes against academic freedom. There is simply no way to reconcile academic boycotts of institutions with the open, liberal, and border-crossing system of sharing ideas that makes academic freedom possible.

This isn’t just a retreat from principle; it’s a challenge to the obvious fact that in a distributed system of knowledge creation and discovery, having institutions that disagree with each other is actually highly productive. At this point, people on campus have so fully drunk the Kool-Aid that it’s worth stating the obvious: There is nothing about a disagreement over policy and geopolitics that somehow magically revokes an institution or scholar’s contribution to the search for truth. It takes a particularly blinkered political outlook to imagine that it does. But this new AAUP policy, in effect, adds a new barricade to the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress Rikki Schlott and I talk about in “The Canceling of the American Mind.”

The AAUP supported a book that proposed a gaping partisan exception to academic freedom

Yet another way the AAUP have undermined their credibility is by promoting a book whose thesis is, at its core, perhaps the most significant attack on academic freedom from the left in decades. 

I am now (unfortunately, once again) talking about Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth’s “It’s Not Free Speech.”

The book is snide, dismissive, and full of dishonest moves. It calls Cancel Culture a “right-wing moral panic.” It accuses Nicholas and Erika Christakis of being provocateurs for defending freedom of speech at Harvard (this was before their much more well-known debacle at Yale, when Erika set off a firestorm by . . . arguing that it was not Yale’s place to lecture students about Halloween costumes). It relegates to a mere footnote the fact that my friend Mike Adams killed himself after facing a cancellation mob, leading readers to believe that he went on to a cushy job at a think tank. 

Most significantly, though, the book advocates for a limitation on “white supremacy.” Now, you can be forgiven for assuming here that maybe they just mean awful things like racial superiority or eugenics. But no. They spend an entire chapter defending critical race theory, leaving no doubt that they mean the all-encompassing metaphysical idea of white supremacy, as something that is manifest in society and everything from law to economics to science. In other words, they favor a conception of “white supremacy” so vast that it effectively limits academic freedom to whatever speech the authors like. This support for CRT also gives a great deal of insight into how the top AAUP folks view freedom of speech outside of their narrow view of academic freedom.

To be clear, FIRE has fought and will continue to fight for the right to teach about CRT. But any time a civil liberties group or academic freedom organization gets together to defend it, they need to remind themselves that the very first thing the founders of CRT did when they established the field was recommend new limitations on speech. This began with Richard Delgado’s 1982 paper “Words that Wound: A Tort Action for Racial Insults, Epithets, and Name-Calling,” which was manifest all throughout the 1980s campus speech codes movement.

In fact, Delgado helped draft the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s campus speech code, which attempted to ban “hate speech” on its campus and led to a 1991 court case, UWM Post, Inc. v. Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, over its overbroad restrictions. These ideas were then formalized in the 1993 book “Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, And The First Amendment (New Perspectives on Law, Culture, and Society),” authored by Delgado and fellow CRT figureheads Kimberlè Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, and Charles Lawrence. (The conflicts continued well into the new millennium, with FIRE stepping in back in 2013 to fight further proposed discriminatory harassment policies based on those original speech codes).

By confirming that they endorse not just the right to teach CRT, but also its operating assumptions and philosophy, Bérubé and Ruth — and by extension, the AAUP — confirm that their notion of opposing “white supremacy” allows them to discount the academic freedom of dissenters and adopts CRT’s hostility to freedom of speech.

The AAUP failed to defend professors who got in trouble for speech unpopular with the left

Scott claims in her Inside Higher Education piece that “FIRE’s favorite groups to represent are on the political right: Young Americans for Freedom, Young Americans for Liberty and Turning Point USA,” and that we merely “cover [our]selves by litigating on behalf of the occasional liberal or even leftist.”

Before we debunk this claim, let’s see how the AAUP itself fares as a self-described “100-year-old association that is dedicated to the articulation and defense of academic freedom.” Does it do so for all professors, or only the ones whose politics they agree with? I decided to contact a number of professors whose cases I felt did not fit the politics of the new AAUP, or which Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth had targeted in their books. Not a single person I contacted said the AAUP lifted a finger to help them. For instance:

• As noted earlier, Erika and Nicholas Christakis — then the associate master and master of Yale’s Silliman college, respectively — were targeted by Yale students in 2015, after Erika sent an e-mail pushing back against a college-wide message encouraging students to be sensitive in their Halloween costume selections. Erika’s message, which she forwarded as a developmental psychologist, argued that we should respect student autonomy in deciding what Halloween costumes they should or shouldn’t wear. When the Christakises were targeted, resulting in Erika resigning from teaching, the AAUP offered no help and had nothing to say. It’s worth repeating here that Bérubé and Ruth accused the Christakises of themselves being provocateurs because they had once defended a free speech case at Harvard as well. (In the book, they also do this while briefly breaking into writing in French — a moment where I utterly cringed for them.)

• Carole Hooven, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, was targeted for alleged transphobia because she expressed the opinion that medical school professors should not back away from using terms like “male,” “female,” or “pregnant woman.” When her 20-year teaching career ended, the AAUP offered no help and had nothing to say. 

• Charles Negy, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida, was targeted by students who didn’t like his right-leaning tweets. When reporting him to the institution didn’t work, anonymous complainers falsely told the institution his tweets were required reading in his classes. When UCF tried to fire Negy following a months-long investigation involving 300 witnesses and a 244-page written report on every moment of his 15 years in the classroom, the AAUP offered no help and had nothing to say. 

• Georgetown University placed Ilya Shapiro under investigation before he even started his job as senior lecturer and executive director for the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. Shapiro had tweeted his preference for an Indian-American jurist over President Joe Biden’s then-unspecified “black woman” for the Supreme Court seat (which Ketanji Brown Jackson would eventually assume). Georgetown spent four months investigating a pair of tweets, chilling the speech of Shapiro and existing professors. The AAUP offered no help and had nothing to say.

• FIRE board member Sam Abrams, a professor of politics and social science at Sarah Lawrence University, was harassed by students for writing a New York Times op-ed sharing his research into viewpoint diversity in college administration. The AAUP offered no help and had nothing to say.

• And of course, the AAUP has offered no assistance to Amy Wax, who has been under fire for years at the University of Pennsylvania over her controversial views on race and gender. No shock there.

Meanwhile the AAUP did loudly protect, for example:

• Maura Finklestein, an anthropology professor who was fired from Muhlenberg College for her pro-Palestinian advocacy.

• Lora Burnett, Suzanne Jones, and Michael Phillips, who Collin College fired for protected speech, such as using social media to criticize the school’s COVID policies (and in Burnett’s case, Vice President Pence’s “little demon mouth”).

• Journalist and professor Nikole Hannah-Jones, who was denied a tenured appointment at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill as the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism despite a faculty recommendation in her favor. Critics questioned whether Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer-prize winning 1619 Project was factually accurate.

• Asheen Phansey, an adjunct faculty member at Babson College, who was terminated after a satirical Facebook post saying Ayatollah Khomeni should respond to a threat to bomb Iranian cultural sites by tweeting, “a list of 52 sites of beloved American cultural heritage that he would bomb. Um... Mall of America? ...Kardashian residence?”

• Jeffrey Klinzman, an adjunct faculty member at Kirkwood Community College, who was removed from the classroom after a Facebook post accusing evangelical Christians of “homophobic bigotry.”

To be clear, the AAUP absolutely should have protected all these people. That’s their job! But it sure seems, from this list, that the AAUP’s favorite groups and individuals almost always happen to represent speech popular with the political left. They may want to check their own record before accusing FIRE of bias.

And by the way, do you know who has come out in defense of free speech and academic freedom in all of the cases mentioned above?

FIRE, that’s who.

As for Scott’s claims regarding our “favorite groups to represent,” and our “occasional liberal or even leftist” clients which we use to “cover ourselves,” we don’t have “favorite groups to represent.” We simply represent groups and individuals whose free speech rights have been violated. 

Scott is quick to mention FIRE’s defense of groups like Turning Point USA, but fails to mention that we’ve also called them out when they’ve gone too far — like they did with their Professor Watchlist back in 2016. Rikki and I also dig into this in “Canceling.” 

In addition to the groups Scott named, we’ve also defended Students for Justice in Palestine, the Portland State International Socialist Organization, the Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists, Students for a Democratic Society, Progressive Zionists for Peace, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and the Students for a National Health Program, DePaul Socialists, Students for Cannabis Policy Reform, College Democrats, the Association of Latino Professionals for America, Students Promoting Equality, Action and Knowledge (SPEAK), Animal Alliance, oSTEM, LGBTQ Aggies, MUA Aggies, and Transcend, and the Lambda Gay-Straight Alliance — just to name a few.

That’s a hell of a lot of occasional liberal and leftist groups, don’t you think?

And that’s not all. As Alex Morey noted in a recent X post, in 2024 FIRE’s Campus Rights Advocacy team intervened in 60 cases where the censorship came from the right of the speaker, compared to 40 cases where it came from the left of the speaker. That’s a 50% difference.

As I have said, we will drive this bus into a wall before we are unprincipled. And our work is right out in the open for everyone to see. The AAUP were engaged in pure projection when they claimed that FIRE is partisan in the cases it takes. And that’s far from the only thing they’ve gotten wrong about us.

The AAUP lied about its most effective competitor — FIRE

“Leaving aside the fact that these partisan attacks violate FIRE’s own insistence on neutrality,” Scott writes in reference to Alex Morey’s comments on X, “they misrepresent FIRE as promoting academic freedom, when that has never been part of its mandate.”

Both of these statements are ludicrous. First of all, FIRE is an organization dedicated to protecting and promoting free speech. We aren’t neutral on that topic. It’s literally our job to call it out when free speech is being undermined, and as you’ve seen we have many reasons to believe the AAUP have undermined it quite a lot. 

Second, while Scott is correct that academic freedom is not explicitly mentioned in our mission statement, this is because we — unlike the AAUP — take for granted that academic freedom is included in freedom of speech, just like the Supreme Court does. As I mentioned above, our courts formally established this in 1957. FIRE has also written many thousands of words on academic freedom over our 25 years as an organization (which, up until 2022, was exclusively focused on defending free speech on campus). We even have a whole section of our website dedicated to it.

Scott also claims that FIRE is “dedicated to the absolutist principle of individual free speech,” which is another ridiculous canard. For all practical purposes, free speech “absolutists” don’t even exist. FIRE has always articulated and accepted the fact that there are clear exceptions to free speech — they just aren’t the kinds of exceptions, like “hate speech,” that many partisans (on the left and the right) would like. The accusation of “absolutism” is just another in a series of falsehoods and straw man arguments designed to allow academics to reserve academic freedom for those with whom they agree, while simultaneously criticizing free speech and even advocating for its limitation to silence those with whom they don’t.

This gets us back to the exchange on X between the AAUP and a few FIRE staffers a couple of weeks back. Since the AAUP deleted some of their most egregiously false claims, we’ll have to include screenshots here for clarity.

In a now-deleted response to what they labeled as Alex Morey’s “laughable, utterly false, and unwarranted attack,” the AAUP called FIRE an “elite, politically motivated & funded org w/ no base that has aligned itself with far right assaults on higher ed.” 

I couldn’t help but chuckle at the idea that we are the elitists in this scenario. The AAUP are defending the $1 trillion industry that creates America’s elites. The projection is, once again, comical. (For the record, I consider myself the type of person who is historically known as a “counter-elite,” who thinks there’s something seriously wrong with our current elite/ruling class. The AAUP might want to read some Peter Turchin.)

X’s Community Notes feature came in handy on this one, pointing out (very easily, with many links) what nonsense the AAUP’s accusation was.

FIRE’s principled, nonpartisan stance is well-documented, but as we’ve seen, the AAUP’s partisanship is on full display.

The AAUP then came back with yet another assertion where they clearly didn’t do their homework. They claimed that FIRE is “complicit w/ the attacks on higher education being led by the Right” who “help develop legislation for state governments that damage academic freedom & aim to remake higher education toward an ideological agenda incompatible with the mission of higher education as a public good.”

When pressed for evidence of such complicity on FIRE’s part, the AAUP replied (also in a now-deleted post) by linking to their page on the “Stop WOKE Act.”

But if you’ve been paying even passing attention to FIRE in the last two years, you will know that we, along with the ACLU, defeated the “Stop WOKE Act” in court and will likely defeat it again on appeal.

Once again, X’s Community Notes did our work for us, noting FIRE’s victorious lawsuit and illustrating that the AAUP’s accusation has no merit:

As I said in my response on X, if we are being controlled by donors who support the “Stop Woke Act,” it’s kind of a weird move for us to quite strongly advocate against it and then defeat it in court, isn’t it?

Another reason this is all absurd is that the “Stop WOKE Act” isn’t the only bill of this kind that FIRE has challenged. Another “divisive concepts” bill is Alabama’s SB 129, for example, which passed this year. SB 129 attempts to regulate the campus DEI bureaucracy in the state, but uses vague and overbroad language that is likely to result in censorship of classroom instruction. And while the bill includes some protections for student organizations, it explicitly prohibits student organizations from using state money to advance “divisive concepts,” which is viewpoint-discriminatory. Since Alabama is also in the 11th Circuit with Florida, we hope our victory in the “Stop WOKE Act” case will make litigation against the Alabama bill unnecessary. 

It’s also worth pointing out that if not for FIRE’s legislative advocacy in a number of states when similar bills were pending, more of those unconstitutional bills would have been enacted.

Bizarrely, Scott also writes that “an initial motivating force [for FIRE’s founding] was the endorsement of the right of racist expression on the University of Pennsylvania campus,” and that “This is a telling choice of where their political affiliations lie.”

Scott is referring here to the University of Pennsylvania’s infamous “water buffalo incident” from 1993, and her framing is an absolute inversion of the truth. What made this such a watershed moment for free speech on campus is that it so perfectly captured the lunacy of campus speech codes. A student was being punished under Penn’s speech code for “racist” speech that Penn knew perfectly well was not actually racist. That’s precisely why the story made national headlines and came up in then-Penn President Sheldon Hackney’s confirmation hearings for head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. (No less than Ted Kennedy himself asked Hackney to explain the facts of the case.)

Go ahead and read up on it, then tell us if you think the AAUP’s framing of FIRE as being founded to protect “racist expression” is remotely accurate, or whether it’s an obvious ad hominem attack meant only to signal to Scott’s political “team” that FIRE should be on their enemies list.

Lastly, there is the perennial accusation that FIRE is controlled by right-wing donors. The reality is, FIRE’s donor pool runs the gamut in terms of its politics, as does our staff. Alex Morey, who has been at the center of this whole thing, is very much a Democrat — as are plenty of folks on the FIRE staff. I’m also a lifelong Democrat who, like many others, feels increasingly orphaned by his party in recent years.

This is no secret to either our right- or left-leaning donors, and we are grateful to all of them for their support regardless of their politics. As FIRE’s Executive Vice President Nico Perrino put it on X in response to the AAUP’s accusation, FIRE received 20,000 gifts last year from supporters across the political and ideological spectrum. And as FIRE Legal Director Will Creeley is fond of saying, “Tell me your politics and I’ll find you at least five cases FIRE has taken that will make you very happy — and five cases FIRE has taken that will piss you off.” 

That’s what it is to be truly nonpartisan.

As I’ve noted in previous posts, sticking to principle and ensuring viewpoint diversity are both critical to FIRE’s success as an organization. Most importantly (and I cannot say this emphatically enough), regardless of who supports us and what they personally believe, our work defending free expression and academic freedom for all does not — and will not — change. Nobody, no matter how much money they have or give us, tells FIRE what to do.

Who will really ‘reckon with the judgment of history’?

At the end of her piece, Scott says that “we are now in such a moment when the mission of the university is under threat and that we must speak out.”

On that, we certainly agree.

Unfortunately, Scott and the AAUP don’t seem to think that the mission of the university includes the pursuit of truth. Instead, she says that “diversity and equality ought to be at the center of university policy.” It is really striking that these were the two principles Scott chose to emphasize here. To the untrained ear that sure sounds nice, but in practice it is as ideological and conformist as it gets — not to mention antithetical to the mission of the university.

Would the public agree to massively fund an already trillion-dollar industry that places regular Americans into tremendous debt if it was merely promising to be diverse and equitable to its employees and customers? No, it would have to deliver something well beyond that, something universities have always been meant to be bastions of. The pursuit of truth, it turns out, is a never-ending and arduous process that requires discipline and principle, as well as a commitment to free expression. And it’s something you’re never going to get with a nakedly partisan, biased view on what thinkers and thoughts should be allowed into the discussion.

Scott then makes a smug and condescending reference to the “judgment of history,” and forwards the idea that it is FIRE who will look bad in hindsight because we are “ideologues” who lack a commitment “to the values that have made U.S. higher education the envy of the world.”

As a matter of fact, we do have a commitment to those values: open inquiry and free expression — which, of course, includes academic freedom. No matter what they tell themselves, the sad fact is that it is the AAUP, along with many colleges and universities in the last two decades, who have abandoned this commitment.

I lack the intellectual arrogance to presume how history will judge me or anyone. Honestly, I find the question tedious. It’s the oversimplification of a midwit who’s read too much Hegel, who thinks that history has a “right side,” and who calls everybody else simpletons. History is messier than that.

The truth is that the AAUP relied on free speech and the First Amendment for its entire existence. But once their leaders got confident that enough “right-thinking people” would be in charge forever, they turned on it. They said nothing as tuition prices and bureaucratization skyrocketed while viewpoint diversity among professors plunged. They stopped defending professors whose speech was unpopular with the kinds of scholars who thought the search for truth was over (and that, as luck would have it, they’re the ones who found it!).

When professors were targeted at an unprecedented rate and a culture of — what might you call it? — cancellation hit academia, causing public trust in higher education to collapse, the AAUP sneered at the idea that Cancel Culture even existed. They failed to protect their colleagues, particularly when they were threatened by fellow academics or students. Indeed, they doubled down and came out in favor of political litmus tests as long as they liked the politics being tested for. They gave in to members who wanted to use academic boycotts to serve political ends even if it torpedoed the search for truth. They supported a new exception to academic freedom that basically meant it was nothing more than what their favored members wished it to be.

They then tripled down, claiming that the plunging respect for academia was just due to some outside right-wing plot rather than contempt for a trillion-dollar industry that wanted to wish all criticisms of itself away. Somehow, they couldn’t understand that this would make them even less respected and trustworthy to the public. Instead, they sidelined truth and helped plunge academia into crisis.

But, of course, it was everyone else’s fault.